Editing The Pen Addict 77/transcript (section)

== Massive Review Index ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' Sorry. And finally, in our follow-up section of events, I just saw this link probably... I think when I got off the airplane and was waiting for my baggage, something like this, a couple hours ago, I saw a link from JetPens from... There's a website that is kind of new on the block, I guess, in the past few months. And it's called PenPaperInkLetter. It's PenPaperInkLetter.com. I'll have a link in the show notes. And I've just been following it back and forth. There's been just kind of a slew of posts, just I don't want to say generic, but very few review posts kind of linking to some giveaways and doing some other things on some other blogs.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And what they did recently was added a page called the Massive Review Index on their blog. Have you been able to look at this, Myke?

'''Myke Hurley:''' I've never even heard of this before.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. I've never even heard of it before a few hours ago.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Okay, let me have a look here.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' You have the page pulled up?

'''Myke Hurley:''' I'm opening it as we speak.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Okay, because my internet's going slow here.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, I can tell.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Sorry. The podcasting professional is going to shoot me by the time we're done with this episode because my internet is misbehaving. Yeah. So penpaperinkletter.com is not coming up for me.

'''Myke Hurley:''' No, it's not for me either.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Oh. Oh, we fireballed it.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Just the two of us trying to get to it at one time is taking it down.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' All right, it's coming up now. Well, good. It's not just me then. It is some of you. Anyway, so what – gosh, I forgot his name. Now the site's coming up. I can't remember his name. The gentleman behind penpaperinkletter.com has decided to aggregate the white work. He's decided to collect every review of every product ever and link it on this page called the Massive Review Index.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' What are your thoughts on this, Myke?

'''Myke Hurley:''' I would have more thoughts if I could see the web page. Is every review that they have done on their site?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Negative. Every review that everyone's done on their websites.

'''Myke Hurley:''' And how many websites are we talking?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, he's just starting. So let's see how many he's got so far.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Like what websites are they including in this?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' All right, so – So you're in it? Yeah, Gourmet Pins, Susan Brown.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Holy moly, there's a lot of stuff here. Wow.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Maybe that's why it's not coming up. So it finally came up for me.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So it's all alphabetical.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Ish. It's kind of alphabetical by category.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, pen, paper, and ink. But I like that they've got – like as you're scrolling down, they throw in the alphabet a few times if you want to jump around. This is insane.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' This is insane. And it's barely scratching the surface.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It's a genius idea though.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, I don't know if I'm going that far. I don't know what to think about this yet. I think the jury's still out to be quite honest with you.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Why?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, so this is presented as a resource, right? I consider this a resource. So this person's done all this work to build this resource. It's a great resource. If there's any monetization on top of this, I'm going to have a problem with it.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Coming as a content creator. I mean I know he's just linking to my site. I got to think about this. I don't want to say anything that might come back to bite me in the butt.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I would say, I would say, to play devil's advocate, what about Inklinks then?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, and I thought exactly about that. But with Inklinks, what I'm doing is sharing the current stories of the week, and then those vanish. Of course, they're still in the archives, but that's kind of a one-time shot. And it kind of goes through and points to things that I like this week. And there's some interactivity to it in the fact that I've put this together from reading different blogs during the week and sorting out the ones that I like the best and put some thought into doing it. This is a permanent resource that will be linked to continuously by the person doing this as, hey, come look at this. Look what I've done here. Here's all these people's content put in one place. Granted, they have to click the link to come through to my page.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, giving you the page view.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So I don't think it's a... I mean, obviously, I'm not the one that's creating here, but I think that is okay.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It probably is. It probably is. I just... It's weird. I don't know. You know how I am sometimes.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So my other question would be to you is, well, why don't you do this on your site then?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I have no interest in doing it. Exactly. Because I don't...

'''Myke Hurley:''' But this makes it really easy for people. So the next time that I'm thinking about buying a pen, I could go here and see somebody's review from a trusted source, rather than just Googling pen addict to see if you've done it.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Sure. Yeah. You know?

'''Myke Hurley:''' So I think it's interesting. I think that I understand where you're coming from, but my other thought would be, okay, let's say they put an ad on this page or whatever. If a person comes through to your site, they may not have ever found it otherwise, and then you actually might end up with a new reader. Yeah, that's fair. And then more ad sales of your own. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I just look at it like, for example, I have a Tumblr that I link, that I collect content of that's tagged a certain way, like on Instagram. So through IFTTT, I've created a website that aggregates all this content, all these images, based on all these tags that I find. It's a private website that only I can see, because I don't want to say I'm putting together a website of all these links that I found on Instagram. It's not my content. Who am I to share a website and have an ad on it with all these other people's pictures on it that are tagged fountain pen?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, but then the difference is it's not linking. It's just flat out displaying.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' No, it links to every Instagram page.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Oh, it links to the page. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, but then people can't make that money on their own. So I understand where you're coming from, but I think it's slightly different.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I think in the end it's fine. It kind of caught me off guard, put it that way. He didn't ask. I mean, not that he has to. I mean, but it would have been nice to get a heads up. Hey, I'm doing this.

'''Myke Hurley:''' That I agree with. Sometimes if you're going to do something like this, just a simple email at least is the right thing to do. Yeah. You know, so then you can, if you say nothing, then fine. You know, I'll take your denial of response as it's okay to do this.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And then he's setting it up to rate people by the quantity of the reviews that they do. Yeah, it seems weird. Yeah. So maybe I'll shoot him an email. It would just have been nice to get a heads up that, hey, can I put, you know, several hundred of your links on this page and then point people to this massive review index that I created. Yeah. I don't know what my answer would have been to be quite honest with you.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I know you well enough, I think, to say that you would say no.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Because you would have had that reaction like you had instantly. Whether you would have ended up changing your mind or not, initially you would have, you know, it would have got your back up a little bit and you would have said, no, I don't want to do it.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. I don't know. Why am I so particular about that? I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I just, I don't know.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It's okay.

'''Myke Hurley:''' You're allowed to be precious about your content.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. And it's not that I'm, it's not that. It's just, I mean, people can link to my, people link to my blog constantly and do it all the time and do, you know, their own ink links posts and that's different. Like, I don't know. I look at this as something different than, you know, standard linking.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Sure.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Anyway, we'll let it go because I, like I said, I haven't had that much time to think about it and I have an email dumb and I'll pull up his name now if the page loads.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Heath Cates. So I'll be, I'll shoot Heath an email and see what, what's the, what's the deal going on here. So maybe I'll have more to report next week and maybe I'll have happy, fun, good news.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Brad goes on the email offensive again. First visionary.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, I mean, I don't, I don't feel it's fair for me to talk about people without getting their input as well.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I agree with that. That's the, that's the gentlemanly thing to do. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I mean, I'm, I'm open. I'm an open book.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Can I say again, just how much I love my Edison pearl?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yes, you can.

'''Myke Hurley:''' That's all.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I saw it on the, what did I see it on the Instagrams this week or on the Twitters? You saw it on Instagram. Yep. That's a sexy pen.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I don't really have much to say. I just, I just freaking love that pen.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I know. It's, I'm, I'm really glad you bought that pen and I didn't even think about recommending it to you because that's one that I would have wanted you to try instead of buying, you know, and we, we talked about it when it first came out and, you know, that's just something you'd want to try before dropping the cash on it. But I'm glad you got to try it. Just like we talk about all the time, people should try these things if at all possible. Sometimes it's not. And, um, boy, you have, uh, got yourself a winner.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I'm very, very happy with it. And I just love this, the ink, that orange ink.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I'm going to have to, uh, I'll, I might order that next week.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It, it, it's just such a great color and it just adds something.